I almost moan as I remember. Remy’s hand sliding up my throat. His eyes half-mast as he looks down at me. Our ragged breathing. His mouth hot and damp and shamelessly kissing me. He only kisses my mouth, my throat, and my ears. He licks and tastes, and triggers all kinds of sensations in my body.

I remember moaning. Remember the way he smiles against my lips at the drawn-out sound, and the way he turns very serious and intense as he comes back to taste me and sucks my lower lip and then bites and suckles the skin at my throat. I remember his body pressing against mine and my pussy throbbing with the nearness of his erection. Our tongues. Hot and desperate, flicking and probing. I want him so much it’s all I can think about. I think I begged him last night, “Please…” but I was so drugged with lust I’m not even sure. What I do know is that he stops sometimes, when his breath is crazy fast, and takes a cold shower.

But he comes back, wearing drawstring pants or tight sexy boxers, and once again envelops my body with the sheer size and protective shield of his, only to bend that dark head to mine and continue torturing me. He fucks my ear with slow, deep flicks of his tongue. He does the same to my mouth. Laps and tastes my throat. My collarbone. He gets me so hot, my teeth chatter from the way the air feels so cold on my flesh. Arousal drips down my thighs. My nipples become hard as diamonds. He works me to a lather, to the point where a mere sip of his mouth makes me moan from deep inside, like I’ve just been penetrated.

He’s taking it so slowly with me I feel like a teenager and a virgin, though I certainly am neither. But I feel claimed, and bonded to him like animals do. I feel like I’ve been already caught and trapped and he’s merely priming me, leaving me to simmer in my juices, anxiously waiting for the moment when he takes his first bite of me.

I seriously can’t stand it and am wet even now.

We don’t talk much when we “bond” in his bedroom. I sense he’s been in his man-cave these days, and I understand it. Yesterday, he didn’t even let me come out, and kept me pinned down in his bed, a helpless slave to his kisses.

When we need to stop, sometimes we hear music, turn on the TV, or eat, but most of all, we kiss. I sometimes hear nothing but the slick sounds of him kissing me, and our fast breaths, tearing one after the other. The night before the last, I was so primed by the time he came to fetch me from my room, I almost jumped into his arms. By the time we sank into his bed, my hands were already in his hair, my tongue desperately pushing into his warm, delicious mouth, and when he responded with an animal growl and a powerful kiss that sucked my tongue feverishly, I felt each of his pulls on my tongue ping little bolts of pleasure to my sensitized little clit. It swells and throbs when we kiss, and I get delirious remembering. Now just the tiniest look from him swells me up. When he glances at my lips. When he tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear. I know we’re just sending our adrenals to hell, doing this. Keeping the output of this lust is just not healthy, but I can’t stop him. In fact I want more. I want him to stop because we’re suffering and I want him to go on until I lie dead in his arms, burnt to ashes from my want of him.

I want him. Every hour, minute, and second.

I wanted him that first night, when I tried to brainwash myself and pretend I didn’t. And now I want him like I want to breathe, to eat, to live a happy life, to see my sister again, to be satisfied in my job. I want him like I want to live my present without any fear whatsoever of what may, or may not, happen tomorrow.

I’m not even afraid that he will hurt me. I know this will hurt.

When I go back home, when this has to stop, it’s going to hurt. Nothing lasts forever and I know it better than anyone.

But fear has never been a friend of mine.

When I decided to compete in track, it wasn’t with a fear that I would lose, or that I would break my knee and have wasted a decade of my life training for nothing. You go after something because you want it bad enough to expend every one of your efforts to get it and will even risk some losses as you chase after it. Now, all the efforts in my body seem to hone in on the soul-consuming physical need for closeness to this man. It’s so overwhelming sometimes when I stretch him, the need to feel him embedded deep inside me where he makes it hurt is so overwhelming that I just don’t even know what to do with it and I need to stop.

Even now, I realize I’ve settled down next to him as close as I can without sitting on top of him, all the length of my pink jean-clad thigh pressing against his jean-clad thigh, and he smiles the dimpled smile that curls my toes, because I think he likes me to be close to him too. He takes off his headphones, and then ducks his head to me, as if silently asking me to tell him what’s going on.

“They’re worried about you.”

He turns to hold my gaze. “Me or my money?”

His quiet question feels as intimate to me as the whispers he told me when he kissed me in his room last night, when he whispered kiss me back and called me pretty and kept telling me I smell so good.

“You. And your money,” I tell him.

Those dimples come again but only briefly, appearing as if two angels just squeezed his lean cheeks. “I’m going to win. I always do.”

I smile, and when his gaze drops to my smile, an awareness of my mouth seizes me.

My lips feel swollen and red today, raw from his. His eyes darken even more as he studies them, and a shiver rushes through me. I try to stifle it at the same time I fight not to stare back at his beautiful mouth as well, which does look deliciously, gut-wrenchingly pinker and thicker from my kisses today.

“Do you want to run today? To get ready for tomorrow?” I ask him, and it’s taking all my effort to focus on anything but the fire raging inside me.

He shakes his head.

“You’re tired?” I prod.

He nods with sad eyes, his voice low, but not apologetic. “So fucking tired I can barely pull myself out of bed.”

I nod in understanding, because I feel a little of that too. I don’t want to get up. Especially with this enormous muscled man in the same bed, where I just want to torture myself all over again with my wanting him.

I lean back, feel his shoulder against mine resting on the backrest, and I want to curl up like I did last night when we just couldn’t keep up the kissing and caught a couple of hours of sleep. I think he senses I’m tired too, and he shifts slightly so I can rest my head on him.

He passes me a song.

I’m too lazy to pass him any of mine, so I just listen. Norah Jones’s smoky, beautiful “Come Away With Me” begins playing, sensually proposing that I do exactly as the title suggests.

The tone is so sexy and reminds me so badly of our nights together, our stolen moments kissing, that it gives me a fever. Suddenly he leans over to try to listen through my earphones, and when I get a closer whiff of his clean male scent near me, my muscles throb painfully tight. I instantly grab my music, and select a modern song that’s been playing in the radio lately about a boxer who’s strong and fights incredibly hard. I wanted to play “Iris” for him. I wanted to play something to beg him to make love to me. But his team is worried, and I know that whatever we’re doing at night isn’t conducive to good athletic performance. No matter how much I crave those moments and crave what they’re leading to, I can’t sabotage him like this. He’s too important.

I watch his profile as he listens. His expression is unreadable at first. When he finally raises his head, his gaze is dark and troubled. “You play me a song about a fighter?”

I nod.

He tosses my iPod aside with a scowl. Then, he reaches around and grabs my hips. He drags me onto his lap, and my breath goes when I feel how much, how unmistakably, he wants me. “Give me another one,” he demands.

The primal look in his eyes makes me shudder.

I shake my head. “We can’t keep doing what we’re doing, Remy. You need your sleep,” I whisper.

“Give me another song, Brooke.”

He sounds so stubborn that I want to scowl, but it actually … excites me. He wants my songs as badly as he wants my kisses, and it makes me high. All right then. If he wants it, then we need to go all the way tonight and make love, not just jack ourselves up. So I find “Iris” and hand him the song. I straighten and watch his profile when he hears it. He is unreadable once more, but when he raises his head this time, his eyes are torpedoes of heat. His erection is fierce under my lap, and I feel his heart pulsing rhythmically there. In his hardness.

“Ditto,” he says.

“To what?”

His eyes flick up to the other passengers before grabbing my hair and drawing my head down so he can lick my lips side to side with his tongue. “To every lyric.”

I shudder and pull back. “Remy … I’ve never had an affair before. I just won’t share you. You can’t be with anyone else while you’re with me.”

He strokes a thumb across my damp lower lip, his gaze intense. “We won’t be having an affair.”

I stare dumbly, certain I just heard an organ in my body crack in my chest.

His hands clamp around me, and he crushes me to his body as he slides his nose along the shell of my ear. “When I take you, you’ll be mine,” he says, a soft promise in my ear. He slides his thumb along my jaw, then gently kisses my earlobe. “You need to be certain.” His eyes are so hot that I’m on fire with the lust in them, and the word “mine” makes the empty place between my legs swell with longing. “I want you to know me first, and then, I want you to let me know if you still want me to take you.”

The word “take” is also having an effect. I’m just a big mass of quaking need. “But I already know I want you,” I protest.

He looks at my lips with fierce intensity, then into my eyes, his stare so pained and tormented I’m stunned with the darkness I see. He strokes a hand down my bare arm, waking up all the little hairs there. “Brooke, I need you to know who I am. What I am.”

“You’ve had tons of women without this requisite,” I plead.

His big hands engulf my bottom as he hauls me closer again, his eyes brimming with need, gobbling up my features, and drowning me in their depths.

“This is my requisite with you.”

A flash of wild need rips through me as I realize what he’s telling me.

He won’t take me yet.

Even when it’s all I think about. All I want.

Today, it’s daylight, and I’m still living in the last bed I was in, with him, with his mouth devouring mine.

He wants me to know him, and I want to know him, but if I know him and like him just a little bit more than I already do, our emotional connection will be too strong for me to ever go back to the way I was before him.

He’s powerful, physically, but emotionally, he demolishes me.

I can’t take much more of this. And neither should he.

Feeling an odd heaviness in my chest, I lean into his ear and whisper, “We still can’t keep this up, Remy. Not when your championship is on the line. So you either come get me tonight to make love to me, or you leave me alone so we can both rest.”